POPULAR DREAMS: Peace and Understanding
I was sipping my Dragonwell tea and tasting a little J. Krishnamurti this morning when I stumbled on this: “The unknown is not the future but the present.” Isn’t it strange how we think that we know what’s happening now but don’t know what’s going to happen in the future? Our conditioned body/mind experience of this, here, now, is assumed to be known, right?
Take this moment and the space you find yourself in now. Look around. You pretty much think you know what’s going on in your room, don’t you? There’s say, chairs and a table over by the bed near a window; the sky is grey today, the carpet needs cleaning; some old newspapers need tossing, you’ve got a headache…whatever!
That’s a typical description of how we look and label and assume we know things.
In truth, you and I don’t know the simplest things about our world. We peer out at our world “ as through a glass, darkly” and are generally content with our sensual and conceptual descriptions of its content.
In fact, what we’re perceiving is a very highly edited and interpreted edition of reality. We “read” it like a book, with our limited and conditioned understanding. And we further assume that the way we see things is the way the world is, or surely ought to be, right?
It’s all a little crazy. I mean, what in the world do we think is going on when we march for peace and understanding and don’t know our own conflicted mind and the violence we do to each other every day?
Peace begins not just in this physical hereness, sitting at home in our received version of time and space. Real peace resides in reality – a reality that is never conflicted about what’s going on. A reality that rests in chaos, in the heart of the storm. A reality that changes continuously like passing clouds and wars and injustices; that changes even as we’re attempting to grasp and redirect it. It is there we find peace, or nowhere.
Fortunately, although we may angst over it a lot, Reality – life as it is and not as we think it is – is a survivor! Life itself survives not only through constantly changing, but because it is the nature of life to perpetuate itself. Life begets itself in “the ten thousand things”.
Peace is already here and now in this unknown and peaceful present. In truth, nothing is wrong, nothing is missing. When we know that, we can then perhaps pick up our signs and march – not to change the world into some ideal version of it, but to serve without knowing, to follow in the direction that spirit seems to be moving. A direction which is never against the flow of what is. And to “do” all that, understanding that we have no control over the outcome. To act because life seems to be flowing that way now; to act without any personal investment in the results, period. This natural action is not reaction; it comes from life as it is expressed in the moment. And it returns to stillness, to the peace beyond understanding. To love, from love.
